A Lively Celebration of the Day of the Dead

Every year in late October, Eloy Tarcisio travels from his home and studio in Mexico City to the California Center for the Arts here, where he ropes off a field of small square plots in the museum’s gravel courtyard. On Nov. 1, residents from the area gather in the courtyard to celebrate the Day of the Dead by making offerings in honor of their loved ones. The stark site grows dense with texture and the intertwining narratives of past lives as, within Tarcisio’s grid, visitors set down photographs, flowers, bowls of beans, trophies, toys, bread, candles, shoes. Private tributes become public sculpture in this deeply resonant community ritual.

In the courtyard installation, “Muerte de todos ofrenda de participacion/Death Comes to Everyone: A Participatory Offering,” Tarcisio facilitates; his own presence recedes as that of the participants increases. This year, when the event recurs for the fifth time, it will overlap with a recently opened exhibition of the artist’s paintings and mixed-media works in the museum--and inside, his own presence is formidable. His massive canvases have visceral impact, and are far more confrontational than the tender, collaborative installation staged outside, yet they, too, render palpable the forces of death, sacrifice and memory.

A huge, unstretched canvas nailed to the wall, “Vista de 500 an~os del valle de Mexico 12-10-92/500 Year View of the Valley of Mexico 12-10-92” (1992) is awash in ox blood--thin washes and thick pools, dried and cracked like parched earth. No recognizable images announce themselves, but the painting is far from abstract. It is more real, more physically convincing than any illusionistic representation. All color and texture, the painting reads like an immense wound. It summarizes history (both the history of Mexico’s conquest by Spain and the Aztec practice of human sacrifice) through the concentrated power of its vital life force, blood.

Another canvas, nearly as large, assumes the character of witness, plain-spoken and direct. Dried rose petals encrust its surface and seem to stain the canvas a reddish-brown, the color of diluted blood. The melancholic poetry of paintings by Los Angeles’ Enrique Martinez Celaya come to mind here, and also in a sequence of canvases coated in mole (the sauce made of ground chiles and spices) and punctuated by a single word or phrase: “Memoria/Memory,” “No se Olvida/Not Forgotten,” “Fin/The End” (1999).

Symbols of death--blood, the heart, the cross--always double as symbols of life. The gray, rubbery hearts preserved in jars in Tarcisio’s “Vista del Hombre/View of Man” (1994-96) are blatantly un-alive, yet they retain their mystery as compact engines of life.

This exhibition, curated by the Center for the Art’s Catherine Gleason, is Tarcisio’s first solo show in the U.S., and it surveys well the insistent materiality of the artist’s static work of the past 15 years. (He also creates work, like the Day of the Dead installation, that incorporates performance and public participation.)

Tarcisio’s imagery consists of icons of Mexican history and identity, such as the nopal cactus and the Aztec pyramid. An essayist in the exhibition’s handsome catalog credits him with conceptualizing the Neo-Mexicanist movement before it was so labeled by an art historian in the late ‘80s. Sacrifice and suffering underlie Tarcisio’s blood-drenched canvases, just as they serve as the historical foundation for Mexican culture--and, Tarcisio asserts, as the condition of daily life.

Tarcisio also paints images of birth and of bodies falling, descending into the dark vacuum of temptation. A sense of sacrifice and loss pervades the work, but always in concert with a fiercely tenacious embrace of life and love. “No Sun Without Shadow” is the title of the museum’s other exhibition on view (a retrospective of prints and paintings by Harry Sternberg), but it’s not a bad fit for this one, either. Tarcisio’s vision fuses the gentle and the harsh, the transcendent and the brutal, death as an end and a beginning.

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* California Center for the Arts, 340 N. Escondido Blvd., Escondido, (760) 839-4120, https://www.artcenter.org, through Dec. 31. Closed Mondays.